This is a co-creative and participatory toolkit of relevance to researchers, civil society and institutions working with newcomers, migrants, refugees and those supporting them (citizen actors and organisations).

The City of Refuge Toolkit aims to explore the needs these actors have: such as the resources they need, and the obstacles they face when they try to build inclusive, safe and equitable local and national communities and spaces. The toolkit brings people together to discuss and share their experiences, to build connections and find common ground. It asks participants to identify what an ideal City of Refuge would need to be a reality (the ‘ideal’ city of refuge could be adopted from neighbourhood-level to national level).

The toolkit contains:

Individual Task Sheets

Group/collaborative Work Sheets

A Workshop Facilitation guide for working with refugees/newcomers

A Workshop Facilitation guide for working with citizen actors

A Materials Guide suggesting icons and images for stickers

It is available in four languages – Arabic, English, German and Greek.

The toolkit has been devised and created by Giles Lane, with Myria Georgiou, Deena S Dajani, Kristina Kolbe & Vivi Theodoropoulou.

AboutThe toolkit has been developed for the study of the city of refuge and to understand how cities are shaped through migration as spaces of hospitality, collaboration but also of exclusions and restricted rights. The tool can be used in different contexts and spaces – from neighbourhoods to cities and to countries, depending on users’ particular focus. The principle remains the same: to co-create knowledge with those directly involved in identifying what makes (and/or hinders) inclusive and diverse spaces of belonging in the context of migration.

The methodological approach integrates and promotes the principle of co-creative knowledge production with the people involved in processes of migration, either as those moving or as those receiving them. More particularly, the toolkit invites participants in cities (also neighbourhoods and countries) at the aftermath of (forced) migration to record their own understanding of needs, resources and obstacles that make hospitable and inclusive spaces of belonging. It comprises nonlinear tools for producing collective knowledge and capacity among those affected by migration to identify needs, resources and obstacles, especially in their attempt to build collective projects and resist exclusions from rights and resources on the basis of nationality and origin.

The toolkit particularly challenges the linearity of narratives that have been privileged in representations of migrant and refugee voices, which are often narrowly defined through either “the refugee as a victim” or “migrants as assets for the economy”. Furthermore, the integration of visual tools in the toolkit aims to integrate participants’ diversity in terms of gender, linguistic and literacy skills. The different tropes used in the toolkit invite participants to work collectively and nonlinearly by writing, drawing and using stickers; in this way, the toolkit aims to tackle hierarchies among research participants, which lineal and fully narrational methods can reproduce.

It was a good moment also to reflect on how so much of my work hinged on a meeting I had almost exactly 19 years ago, in the Spring, with Professor Roger Silverstone at the LSE. From that meeting we went on to establish the SoMa (Social Matrices) think tank for culture – a groundbreaking collaboration between the LSE, the RCA (where I was a Research Fellow) and Proboscis. Roger’s support and trust in me and my idea that we could create new research trajectories through transdisciplinary collaborations has borne much fruit over almost two decades; and in this latest collaboration I think he would have been pleased to see another risky project realised with sensitivity, commitment to our participants and partners, and its results beginning to have effect in the wider world.

]]>6126People Centred Practiceshttp://proboscis.org.uk/6123/people-centred-practices/
Thu, 21 Mar 2019 16:29:50 +0000http://proboscis.org.uk/?p=6123Last October, as part of our work on the British Library’s Single Digital Presence project, I gave an internal training session on the subject of people centred practices. I summarised the talk in the booklet below which was published through bookleteer:

]]>6123UnBias: Fairness in Pervasive Environmentshttp://proboscis.org.uk/6095/unbias-fairness-in-pervasive-environments/
Tue, 18 Dec 2018 13:44:40 +0000http://proboscis.org.uk/?p=6095Last week I ran a workshop at the TIPSbyDesign Symposium hosted by Design Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. It was the second symposium of the PACTMAN project, aiming to build a community of UK TIPS (trust, identity, privacy and security) researchers. There were 5 workshops run over two days, as well as two keynotes, one by Georgina Bourke of If on their collaboration with LSE Data and Society, “Understanding Automated Decisions”, and one by Prof Paul Coulton on “More-than-human centred design”.

Organiser, Bettina Nissen, invited me to devise a workshop that addressed the problem of designing fairness in ‘pervasive environments’ – i.e. spaces where technology is present and capturing data, but where we might not be giving our explicit permission for our data to be captured. Bettina was also keen to see and experience the UnBias Fairness Toolkit, so I devised a workshop that used its tools to frame a problem space and explore its implications; to define key concerns and values; and to develop some principles that could guide future design.

We began by imagining some actual ‘pervasive environments’ and chose three (airports, shopping centres and taxis) to explore in more depth. The 20 participants divided into 3 groups, each choosing one type of environment to explore – identifying the various ‘actors’ (those installing/imposing technology within the environment and/or capturing data from it) and those being acted upon (i.e. having data about them, their behaviours and potentially interactions with the devices being captured). To help with this, we used the Data cards from the UnBias Awareness deck, and to consider the consequences and impacts (potential benefits and harms) we used both the Factors and Examples cards. We also used the Rights cards to asses how rights and laws protecting individuals would come into play in such spaces.

The TrustScape worksheets were used to identify and communicate a key concern to be shared with the other groups:

After a break, we reconvened and each group passed their TrustScapes to another. We then used the MetaMap worksheets to respond to the TrustScapes, also using the Values cards to help guide the responses:

Finally, we discussed the outcomes of the exercises and used them to define 6 principles for designing ‘fair’ pervasive environments:

Allowing participants to opt out without missing out

Exposing the role and relationship to regulators for all actors and participants

Understanding the motivations of stakeholders who define and control such environments

Providing space for negotiating alternatives to standard Terms and Conditions

Providing transparency with regard to the bigger picture laws and rights governing public spaces and behaviours in them

Providing visibility of how power operates and what the imbalances are

The workshop was an intense process over almost 3 hours and I would like to thanks all the participants for their efforts and contributions making it such a valuable experience.

Just last week I was in Athens as part of the LSE City of Refuge project team, where we repeated the process begun in London in July and continued in Berlin in October, to engage with refugees, or newcomers, and the citizen actors who welcome and support them. This involves building links with local organisations and activists, as well as the newcomers themselves, to hear their stories and to invite them into a process where we can learn from their experiences.

Much as in London and Berlin, I have supported and helped supervise facilitating the workshops I devised. These are conducted in the languages of the newcomers (mainly Arabic & Turkish) and the local citizen actors (Greek & English) and were all held in the multicultural 87th Elementary School of Athens in the Gazi district. This meant a partial re-configuration due to the wider mix of languages – with Myria Georgiou leading the Greek-speaking group, alongside her assistant PhD student, Afroditi-Maria Koulaxi and Dr Vivi Theodoropoulou. Meanwhile Deena Dajani and I led the English-focused group while local activist and teacher, Natasa Vourna, provided Turkish-language facilitation for the Kurdish newcomers’ group. Deena also led the Arabic-speaking group in the second session. As before Marcia Chandra has been a key part of the workshops as her series of portraits accompanying the project develops in each site.

The images of the worksheets below demonstrate, again, the strong levels of engagement and enthusiasm which all the participants brought to this process, capturing and sharing their thoughts, emotions and experiences. Many deeply affecting stories emerged: of difficult journeys across time and space, of acceptance and rejections, of exile and new homes. The range of places that people had originated from was also wider than we had encountered in London or Berlin, with new and different themes emerging which resonated but also struck different notes. One of the key differences was the international cast of citizen actors who had come to Greece to help support the steady stream of refugees. There was also a sense that the situation was more complex than we had previously encountered – against the backdrop of the continuing economic problems experienced in the wake of the 2008 financial crash, and the strong presence of international aid agencies in coping with the scale of the humanitarian emergency of people fleeing war and terror in the region. There seemed more fluidity in terms of what it meant for people to be ‘settled’ in Greece, and a multi-varied strata of access and opportunity depending on who you were and where you came from.

The project will now go into an analysis and writing up stage, with outcomes due in the Spring – including an exhibition of Marcia’s portraits and stories. Combined with the detailed interviews this should prove to be a powerful examination of what it is like both to experience being a newcomer and to be part of the fabric of support that welcomes and supports them across the three cities, hopefully revealing insights that could strengthen international links between citizens and improve policies.

Just over a week ago I was in Berlin as part of the LSE City of Refuge project team, where we repeated the process begun in London in July to engage with refugees, or newcomers, and the citizen actors who welcome and support them.

This involves building links with local organisations and activists, as well as the newcomers themselves, to hear their stories and to invite them into a process where we can learn from their experiences. My role has been to devise and supervise the facilitation of workshops, which have been conducted mainly in the languages of the newcomers (Arabic) and the local citizen actors (German). In Berlin this has meant stepping back whilst Dr Deena Dajani (Project Research Officer) and Kristina Kolbe (PhD student and Research Assistant) take on the active role of facilitators and mediators of the activities in the workshops. Project leads Professor Myria Georgiou and Dr Suzanne Hall were also on hand to participate in the workshops, alongside artist Marcia Chandra who is creating a series of portraits to accompany the project.

The centre of of engagement process was Refugio.berlin, an organisation in the district of Neukölln that supports a mix of locals and newcomers with accommodation and other services. A number of residents there took part in the workshops, as well as others from across Berlin. Once again, we had a series of fantastic workshops with highly engaged participants who responded with great enthusiasm and energy to the questions being asked and the formats (worksheets and stickers) for capturing their thoughts, emotions and experiences. Some key themes emerged that mirrored the experiences we encountered in London – e.g. time, the weight of bureaucracy, language etc – but there were some marked differences too. The citizen actors displayed a much stronger sense of coherence and capability than in London, perhaps enabled by the much greater resources made available by the German government. The huge difference in scale of the acceptance of refugees between the UK (about 20,00 people) and Germany (around 1 million) was visible too, both in terms of the coordination and funding between state and non-state organisations, and in the expectations of integration into German life and culture.

As part of the UnBias project I was asked to create illustrations for the Fairness Toolkit’sTrustscape and Awareness Cards. The toolkit is designed to raise awareness and create dialogue about algorithms, trust, bias and fairness. My involvement in the project started with a series of quick sketches for stickers to be used with the Trustscape. The sketches were made in response to the results of workshops with young people who identified issues, themes and difficulties in the network world, and described a wide range of bias in algorithmic decisions and how they impact on peoples lives.

For the UnBias Awareness Cards the brief was to create a design for each of the eight suits: Rights, Data, Factors, Values, Process, Exercise and Glossary. The fronts of the cards contain examples, activities, scenarios and information about algorithmic bias and the ways prejudiced behaviours can emerge in systems. The focus of my illustrations was on how algorithmic decisions could affect people and communities; how do we know decisions are being made fairly and not threatening rights; how do we know decisions are not being based on gender and race? How do we know we are in social media bubble, what is real or fake and what to trust?

At the same time I also wanted the illustrations to celebrate some of the pioneering developments in computing, often made by people who wanted to enable others, and to reference the history of communication technologies, computation devices, predicting machines and mass communication technologies.

It was important for each card to be unique but for the common themes to flow through all of them.Across the cards you will find patterns and references to computation devices and processes: QR codes, punch cards, network diagrams, server arrays, excerpts of code for sorting algorithms, circuit board diagrams, flowcharts, early devices like the Difference Engine and Tide Predicting Machine no 2, the Mac Classic and the handheld devices and social media apps we use today. Since algorithms work behind the scenes of the web to filter and sort data, several cards feature machines used for measuring, weighing, sorting, ranking, dividing and filtering.

The main text styles are inspired by typefaces that have a relationship to the history of computing. ‘Factors’ is based on the early Selectric font for IBM’sSelectric electric typewriter which went on to become one of the first to provide word processing capability. ‘Exercise’ and ‘Example’ were inspired by the typefaces in early forms of electronic communication; telegrams,teletext and ticker tape. The lettering of‘Data’, ‘Values’, ‘Rights’, ‘Process’ and ‘Glossary’ were inspired by fonts I had seen on early computation devices, like Pascal’s Typewriter,Babbage’s Difference Engine, Kelvin’s and Ferrel’s Tide Predicting Machines, and by typefaces used on mass-produced adverts and posters in the industrial revolution.

The edge of the main title scrolls are decorated with mathematical motifs like > <, ( ), X, etc. And the outer borders are decorated with binary. One of the simplest ways of visualising an algorithm is using a flowchart, and the centre shape of each card is inspired by the frames used in flowcharts to represent different stages of the process:- ‘stop/start’, ‘database’, ‘processing’, ‘decision’, ‘repetition’ ‘connector’.

UnBias Awareness Cards – Glossary Suit Illustration

Glossary is a bit different to the other cards, there is only one Glossary card and it holds a definition of the meaning of ‘ALGORITHM’. The images on the back reference various storage and processing devices, reel to reel, server array, a mac classic, an early word processor, tablet, ticker tape, punch cards, fortran cards, blackboard and an abacus.

The card also celebrates some pioneers in mathematics. The algorithm on the computer screen and on the blackboard is Euclid’s Greatest Common Divisor (GCD), dating back to Ancient Greece it is one of the oldest algorithms still in usage.

The writing around the scroll border are excerpts from Ada Lovelace‘s pioneering algorithm to calculate Bernoulli numbers, written in the early 1840s, it is considered by some to be the first computer programme. Ada was an english mathematician, thought to be the first computer programmer and the work this is from is one of the most important documents in the history of computing.

Standing at the chalkboard is Dorothy Vaughn, a leading mathematician and early programmer who worked at NASA and its predecessor in the 1930s, 40s, 50s and 60s. Working in a time of racial segregation she led the West Area Computing team. She was the first African American supervisor at NASA and one of very few women at that level, but was not officially acknowledged, or paid, as such for several years. She was visionary in her realisation that computers would take over much of the human calculators work and taught herself FORTRAN and other languages, which she then taught to the other women, to be ready for the change. Her work fed into many areas of research at the Langley Laboratory and she paved the way for a more diverse workforce and leadership at NASA today.

Grace Hopper was a groundbreaking programmer who, in the 1950s and 60s, pioneered machine-independent programming languages and invented one of the first compiler tools that translated English words into the machine code that computers understood. Grace was an American computer scientist who realised that people would more easily be able to use computers if they could programme in English words and then have those translated into machine code.She created the FLOW-MATIC the first English like programming language and was instrumental in the Development of COBOL, which is still widely used today. She did much to increase understanding of computer communications and went on to push more women to enter the field and for people to experiment and take chances in computing.

A Raven sits on the Blackboard watchingbecause all Corvids (Ravens, Crows, Rooks etc)are renowned for their problem solving skills (the Crow Search Algorithm (CSA) is based on the intelligent behaviour of crows).

MAPPING PERCEPTION was a four year collaboration between Giles Lane, curator and producer (Proboscis), Andrew Kötting, the acclaimed director of Gallivant, This Filthy Earth and Ivul and Dr Mark Lythgoe, neurophysiologist at the Institute of Child Health, London.

MAPPING PERCEPTION examines the limits of human perception through an investigation of impaired brain function, making visible the connections between scientific and artistic explorations of the human condition, probing the thin membrane between the able and the disabled.

At the heart of the project is Eden, Andrew’s daughter. She was born at Guy’s Hospital, London, in 1988 with a rare genetic disorder – Joubert Syndrome – causing cereberal vermis hypoplasia and several other neurological complications. Eden thus participates in the project as both a catalyst and a cypher for a more general investigation into how we see the world and perceive difference.

UnBias Fairness Toolkit Educators Workshop
Seminar Room 1, Sackler Centre for arts education
Saturday 22, 11.30-13.30
Algorithms, bias, trust and fairness: how do you engage young people is understanding and discussing these issues? How do you stimulate critical thinking skills to analyse decision- making in online and automated systems? Explore practical ideas for using the UnBias Fairness Toolkit with young people to frame conversations about how we want our future internet to be fair and free for all.

UnBias Fairness Toolkit Industry Stakeholders Workshop
Seminar Room 1, Sackler Centre for arts education
Saturday 22, 14.30-16.30
The UnBias project is initiating a “public civic dialogue” on trust, fairness and bias in algorithmic systems. This session is for people in the tech industry, activists, researchers, policymakers and regulators to explore how the Fairness Toolkit can inform them about young people’s and others’ perceptions of these issues, and how it can facilitate their responses as contributions to the dialogue.

DESIGN TAKEOVER ON EXHIBITION ROAD
Sunday 23, 10.00-17.00
Celebrate ten years of London Design Festival at the V&A with a special event on Exhibition Road. Bringing together events by the Brompton Design District, Imperial College, the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum and the V&A, this fun-filled day of design, workshops and talks will offer something for everyone, and a unique way into the many marvels of Albertopolis.

UnBias Fairness Toolkit Workshops
Young people (12-22 yrs) 12.00-13.30
Open Sessions 15.30-17.00
What is algorithmic bias and how does it affect you? How far do you trust the apps and services you use in your daily life with your data and privacy? How can we judge when an automated decision is fair or not? Take part in group activities exploring these questions using the UnBias Fairness Toolkit to stimulate and inspire your own investigations.

Colleagues from Oxford University and Horizon Digital Economy Institute will also be running UnBias activities as part of the event:

UnBias
The Raphael Cartoons, Room 48a
Drop-in from 12.00-16.00
How do you feel about fake news, filter bubbles, unfair or discriminatory search results and other types of online bias? How are decisions made online? What types of personal data do you share with online companies and services? Do you trust them? Explore these through a range of activities, from Being the Algorithm to Creating a Data Garden, and from Public Voting to making a TrustScape of how you feel about these issues. Suitable for families.

The UnBias Fairness Toolkit is now available to download and use. It aims to promote awareness and to stimulate a public civic dialogue about algorithms, trust, bias and fairness. In particular, on how algorithms shape online experiences, influencing our everyday lives, and to reflect on how we want our future internet to be fair and free for all.

The tools not only encourage critical thinking, but civic thinking – supporting a more collective approach to imagining the future as a contrast to the individual atomising effect that such technologies often cause. The toolkit has been developed by Giles Lane, with illustrations by Alice Angus and Exercises devised by Alex Murdoch; alongside contributions from the UnBias team members and the input of young people and stakeholders.

The toolkit contains the following elements:

Handbook

Awareness Cards

TrustScape

MetaMap

Value Perception Worksheets

All components of Toolkit are freely available to download and print under Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

examine the role of digital communication in the making of cities of refuge. More particularly, it focusses on urban communities’ digital responses to sudden, unplanned and/or unwelcome change resulting from irregular migration into the city. The project zooms into urban neighbourhoods that receive large number of refugees and migrants. It examines how urban communities mobilise digital communication to respond to disruption and develop capacities to manage change. From the development of local networks in support of refugees, to local training into digital skills, cities’ resilience is tested in the capacity to sustain inclusive, integrated and prospering communities.

Our role is to design the engagement activities and direct workshop facilitation with the various groups taking part. The project will work with communities in 3 sites: London, Athens & Berlin over the next 6 months.

On Saturday we delivered the first workshop and engagement activities at the Chesnuts Community Centre in Harringay, working with a group of Syrian and Iraqi refugees to explore their needs, the resources they have access to as well as the barriers and obstacles they face in their new situation here in London. Drawing upon our previous experience of working with vulnerable communities in challenging circumstances we created a simple way for participants to discuss these issues and to begin mapping out and exploring connections between services, places, people, technologies and systems. We also provided ways for participants to reflect on how they perceive the relative values (in terms of safety and utility) of these things and some measure of where the things they value most sit in terms of emotional and physical proximity or distance.

The workshop was conducted in Arabic and the participants split into two groups, each with an Arabic speaking co-facilitator – Dr Deena Dajani & Haneen Naamneh – from the LSE. We used worksheets and stickers with familiar symbols, from app icons to common services, features and resources, to help make the process fun and visual as well as dynamic and open. It was particularly gratifying to see how enthusiastic the participants were to engage in these ways, and to observe how this kind of ‘asset mapping’ across individual experiences enables people to identify key areas of confidence as well as the gaps where things don’t work so well, don’t feel safe or where trust is uncertain. At the end of what became a long session, it was also great to hear how much the participants had valued this opportunity to come together and discuss things collaboratively. Despite having faced many challenges and obstacles on their respective journeys to this point, there was a palpable energy in the room of optimism and determination to make a new sense of home.

We will be working next with local Harringay residents who have been part of the community welcoming these new arrivals to explore these issues from their perspectives too, and a following workshop will happen later in the summer bring together a mixed group of different locals and new arrivals. In the Autumn we will adapt the process to deliver to similar groups in Berlin (Neuköln) and then Athens (Victoria).

]]>5951TKRN: reaching another milestonehttp://proboscis.org.uk/5947/tkrn-reaching-another-milestone/
Sat, 30 Jun 2018 10:46:25 +0000http://proboscis.org.uk/?p=5947Recently a very exciting development has taken place which confirms our confidence in the usefulness of the TKRN project, and its potential to persist beyond the lifetime of the project itself. This milestone is the scanning and uploading of over 40 new TKRN notebooks created by people on the Rai Coast to the Reite village online library by Urufaf Anip, one of the Reite villagers, using the TKRN publishing kit we left in Madang for this purpose.

At the end of our last visit to Papua New Guinea, I spent two days in intensive media training with Urufaf and his sister, Pasen Anip. Neither has used a computer before, although both very familiar with smartphones. We started from basic introduction to the computer and how to switch it on, to exploring the file system and then to setting up email accounts. From there we progressed to using the web, and creating accounts for them both in WordPress so they could post material on the Reite online library site, and how to scan in completed notebooks as multi-page PDFs, name the files and generate images of the front covers.

As we were about to leave PNG, James and I put together a document (in both English & Tok Pisin versions) to remind them of the various steps involved in each process that they could refer to next time – knowing that a one-off intensive training session would never be enough to embed the learning required. Fortunately, the project has been supported by Banak Gamui of the Karawari Cave Arts Project based in Madang, who are hosting the TKRN publishing kit, providing internet access and help with using the technology. Banak’s assistance has been invaluable both in hosting the kit and supporting Reite people such as Urufaf to come into town and help with familiarising them with how to use the computer and the internet to scan in and store online versions of the books they make.

It has been a long journey since our first notebook experiment in 2012, but we have now arrived at a point where Reite people are able not only to complete the physical paper notebooks, but have the capability and competency to digitise them and upload them to the internet for long term preservation. Our trip to the village last month also bore witness to a resurgence in people’s desire to teach and learn their traditional local language, Negkini, as a crucial factor in cultural and social cohesion. There was lots of interest in using the TKRN books to begin writing in Negkini (something only first attempted a few years ago) – both by individuals in the community as well as from teachers at the local school. This suggests so much possibility for cultural renewal and enrichment, especially when combined with the digital skills and capabilities being demonstrated by Urufaf – indigenous public authoring is becoming a practical reality, much more than a vision for what might be possible, or a dream.

It is now more than five years since my first visit to Papua New Guinea and Reite village, on Madang Province’s Rai Coast. I’ve just completed my fourth field trip there with anthropologist, James Leach, where we have been conducting the first stage of a 2 year legacy and handover phase for TK Reite Notebooks, supported again by The Christensen Fund. Our aim is to establish a firm base for Reite people to have control over the tools and techniques we have co-developed with them, and for them to have both the confidence, capability and capacity to share not only their own Traditional Knowledge with others, but to train other communities, who wish to adopt it, in the TKRN Toolkit‘s use too.

Over the years we have been exploring potential partnerships with local organisations both in PNG and in Vanuatu, hoping to build a network of support for TKRN and those using it. Last year James met with Banak Gamui of the Karawari Cave Arts Fund – an NGO based in Madang – who is active in supporting traditional cultural preservation and regeneration initiatives in Madang Province, including the Madang-Maror Network. Banak agreed to help support Reite people continue to use the Toolkit beyond the project’s end, by hosting the basic publishing kit (laptop, printer & scanner) at KCAF’s office and strengthening Reite’s connections with other communities in the area also active in practising, documenting and preserving Kastom culture. In addition, Yat Paol, of Gildipasi/Madang-Maror, was also able to broker a connection with Bismarck Ramu Group, another local NGO which supports communities retain their land and water rights against extractive development. BRG agreed to host a 3 day workshop and 18 participants from Reite and its neighbouring villages, Marpungae, Asang, Soriang and Sarangama, travelled up to Madang to take part, along with Banak Gamui, Yat Paol and Catherine Sparks – formerly Melanesia Program Officer of The Christensen Fund.

Over these days, we increased the core group we had been working with from the village and undertook refresher training in making and using the notebooks co-developed previously. Much time was also spent in discussions about what exactly TK (Traditional Knowledge) means to people for whom it is still an everyday practice – rather than a ‘heritage’ practice as many Western traditions are often relegated to. One of our key Reite collaborators, Urufaf Anip of Marpungae, came up with a popular transliteration – Timbuna Kastom – which seems to capture much of what is both special and at risk about their way of life. Timbuna could be understood as the ancestor spirits which animate the bush, as well as descendants and those to come. Kastom is the traditional way of life that communities in PNG followed for countless generations before the arrival of missionaries and colonialism. As both Christianity, the money economy and industrial development (mining, logging, monocultural farming, factory fishing and other extractive processes) have supplanted traditional beliefs and ways of living, so more and more Papuans have found their connection to land, bush and water have been severed, and their lives made more precarious.

This connection is at the heart of what makes this project such a timely opportunity to revitalize social cohesion and knowledge transmission around the importance of those communities which have retained a strong traditional culture. The workshops also underlined the crucial importance of Tok Ples – local language – which is the blood of Timbuna Kastom/Traditional Knowledge’s beating heart. PNG has over 800 individual languages (not dialects) – with some ranging from just a few tens to thousands of speakers. Until very recently, communities across PNG were almost exclusively oral in culture, writing and literacy being a product of interaction with traders, missionaries and then colonial administration. But there is an intensely rich visual culture – each community creating unique designs reflected in their crafting of objects and decorations as well as styles of house building. Designs are often deeply symbolic, communicating specific stories and meanings, or relating to particular locations. Language and visual design are thus deeply intertwined with the particular geographies and environments which PNG’s many and diverse communities inhabit and steward. Maintaining and strengthening this diversity is as crucial as maintaining the diversity of plants and seed banks for genetic variety. PNG’s school system still teaches predominantly in English, and over the years Pidgin, Tok Pisin, has become the main national language, to the point now where children in many communities are not being brought up to speak their local Tok Ples first, but Pisin instead. As the unique relationships to place are loosened in this way, the connection to land slackens and people are persuaded to register and sell their land to outsiders. For a country where around 80% of people are still reliant on subsistence food production (through their gardens) this is clearly catastrophic.

On the wall of the BRG Community Room where we held the workshop, there is an inspiring quotation from PNG’s 1975 Constitutional Planning Committee:

This is placed next to a copy of the PNG National Goals and Directive Principles:

The workshop provided us with a space and place to collectively retread the ideas and experiments of the past 5 years, and to reiterate the aspirations and ambitions for what the tools and the continued practice of kastom means to traditional communities. Being held in a less isolated and rural setting it also gave us the opportunity to demonstrate the digital aspects that are harder to achieve in the bush: scanning in notebooks and uploading to the online library which we created for Reite. Although almost all the villagers have never used a computer before, are completely unused to keyboards and have only a slim grasp of the workings of file systems and structures, windows and desktop metaphors – they acknowledge the potential benefits that this form of recording and sharing can offer them and are quick to learn it use. Two people (Urufaf and his sister Pasen) were chosen to be the leaders of this activity and to receive additional training later in our visit.

Practising with TKRN notebooks at BRG

The workshop had been programmed to precede and important ceremony in the village, and on its conclusion the villagers, James, myself, Banak, Catherine and Yat’s wife and son made the day-long journey in two small dinghies across Astrolabe Bay and down the Rai Coast, then up 400m above sea level and 10km inland to Reite village, where we would be staying. Over the next days a series of ceremonies and events took place that demonstrated Reite’s strong hold on kastom, the richness of their culture, and just how keenly people wish to continue this way of life into the future and for the benefits of future generations. We took part in a night-time Tamburan event (a performance of secret, sacred instruments) that began in the bush before moving into a Haus Tamburan itself. This was followed the following day by a large kastom food distribution between one village and families of another, followed the next day by a reconciliation payment ceremony and the all-night Singsing to conclude the festivities. In amongst these ceremonies, James, Banak, Catherine and I were invited to address the local school (which James and I worked with back in 2015) about our respective projects and the importance of traditional culture, tok ples and caring for the environment.

The ceremonies over, we rested for a day then returned to Madang for a final couple of days intensive media training with Urufaf and Pasen. This involved introducing them both to the computer from first principles, getting them used to using it for scanning documents, file management, email and using the internet. With the assistance of Banak & KCAF in Madang, and from me remotely from the UK, we will be supporting them gradually take over the maintenance of the Reite Online Library – scanning and uploading completed TKRN notebooks and expanding the resource. As their confidence and fluency with digital technologies grow, there is the potential to increase their skills to include designing their own notebooks and using bookleteer to generate their own publications.

Urufaf & Pasen after 2 days media training

The success of the workshop at BRG and the excitement generated in the village during the ceremonies, has had a significant effect in making the longer term aspirations of the project begin to see light. Reite people are growing in confidence and desire to share this method of practicing and documenting culture and kastom to other interested communities in the region and, in so doing, to establish a name and reputation for themselves. Plans are already underway for a Reite to host a group of representatives from other Madang Province communities next year to demonstrate this and share the TKRN Toolkit and training.